-
Adam Müller’s Twelve Lectures on Eloquence
- Purdue University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
107 ◆ AdAm müller’s Twelve lecTures on eloquence ◆ Library for Politics and History of the Dreimaskenverlag of Munich This essay1 was a brief review of the first volume in a series of new editions of classic works of history and politics. The volume contained lectures that German political philosopher Adam Heinrich Müller (1779–1829) had given in Vienna in 1812—in the midst of Napoleonic Europe. The essay is important for Hofmannsthal’s late theory of language but also as a commentary on military history and leadership. His account of the German language here anticipates his argument in “The Written Word.” It stands to be expected and desired that an enterprise like this series would be undertaken. Anyone who tried to think along with his own side during the war and followed with interest the state documents, statements addressed to other countries, writings and speeches of leading military and civilian officials here in Austria and in Germany must have sensed that there was in all that a stiffness and barrenness, a lack of assurance and dignity of expression, sometimes soft to the point of cliché, sometimes dashing in a forced way, but always without warmth—from which mistrust and discouragement went out for one’s own side. We had to confess that the superiority of historical-political education lay with our opponents; or at least that this education, and this is what mattered, was fluid and general with them in a quite different way: they possessed a political language that knew how to bring the higher and highest concepts into relation to the sphere of the practical, the effective. We have no common higher language in this sense. With us the way of speaking and writing of political and military officials has become disconnected from higher concepts; these have thereby fallen into vulgar and common parlance; and when they are employed on an official occasion , something flat and insincere attaches to them. Nothing of what was promul- 108 ◆ Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea gated by officials or high commanders stands comparison with what emanated a hundred years ago from the chancellery of Archduke Karl,2 who had the benefit, to be sure, of Gentz’s pen.3 Even the manifesto of Kaiser Franz Joseph at the beginning of the World War, though composed with dignity and seriousness, and in a far more human tone than the German proclamations, depends in its style on an old model: the war manifesto of 1859. Even so, everything, in terms of notes and reports from the World War, remains palpably behind similar documents from the post-Napoleonic period: what is there to compare from those written today in humanity and dignity of bearing, in intellectual delicacy and urbanity with the autobiography of Archduke Karl, with the notes and letters of Schwarzenberg,4 Metternich, Gneisenau,5 Scharnhorst?6 We stand, as ever again in the intellectual life of this mysterious nation, the German nation, before a truncated tradition: the peoples of Western Europe, with their unbroken tradition, are superior and victorious by comparison. In such a situation it was less a matter that one or another publisher would see the need that undoubtedly existed—to see historical-political education revived by going back to that earlier, happier epoch—than how the enterprise was planned and how it was introduced. Here the publisher is to be complimented on the choice of the historian who appears as the editor of this volume and whom we should probably regard as the leader of this important and wide-reaching enterprise . Professor Artur Salz, in his collection of the speeches of Adam Müller, On Political Eloquence and Its Decline in Germany, has placed in our hands the book that with one stroke, symbolically, as it were, transposes us into the midst of what is to be done and needs to be revived by us and thereby has made any programmatic remarks from the editor superfluous. The little that the editor has added by way of preface and afterword displays itself to a large degree the quality that we describe with the word “tact,” the older generation with the beautiful word “propriety,” which always goes forth from a great inner balance, the security of knowing what one wants, from the harmony of energies with what is desired. With the new editions of such a politically intended enterprise, whose effect is not limited to one sphere of knowledge but flows into the whole life of the nation...